‘Parents didn’t want their kids to be here’: inside the troubled London school that stopped excluding pupils and restored calm

Alan Streeter was the fifth headteacher at the school in three years when he arrived in 2018. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer

When headteacher Alan Streeter arrived at Beacon High school in Islington, north London, in 2018 the whole place felt “very tense”. Violence was a serious problem and there were 300 suspensions a year as staff wrestled to control it.

Streeter, the fifth head at the school in three years, was faced with “the most stark anti-school feeling” he had encountered in three decades working in London state schools.